Category Archives: Writing

Two-faced

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Today [ 27th June 2013] I am preparing to go to Foyles, Charing Cross Road. It’s the Northern Talent Summer Salon 2013‏  and I have been invited as a runner-up in the Mslexia Children’s Novel competition. I shall have the chance to pitch my work to agents and editors.

My veins are filled with a blend of delight and terror.

On one hand, I get to tell people about The Selkies of Scoresby Nab. These are industry professionals who could help my story on its way to readers. They could become colleagues who bring about my dream – to see one of my stories in the hands of a child who is enjoying it.

On the other hand, I have to pitch my work in front of industry professionals who all know SO much more than I do – and not look like a blinking idiot. I must make sure not to gabble, act the giddy kipper or gesticulate like a complete loon – even though they are all variants of my shy-person-on-the-inside response to such an occasion.

My double-aspected Imagination  tempts and torments me.

Like Kali – mother and destroyer

She shows me agents swarming and competing, a waggle-dance of yearning to sign me up. It’s all very Hollywood small-town-girl-does-good.

She also shows me a tongue-tied numpty boring ever-so-polite agents and editors into a catatonic state. Or else they wander away – with well-mannered excuses, of course – leaving Billie-no-mates on her own and warning their pals to stay clear.

Neither are likely – but my Imagination prefers to present the extremes. I think she’s rather adolescent – everything is all-or-nothing.

This reminds me of the lovely Lucy Christopher at the SCBWI retreat in May. She exhorted us to think about the threat and the promise in the moments we were writing. That the scenes worth showing needed to have that pull – of teetering between success and disaster. That’s where the drama lies.

That’s what’s meant by WRITE SCARED,  I think. And that’s what’s so exciting about such an event, about presenting your work to the world. It could go either way.

So, whatever happens – and I will keep my lovely readers informed – I resolve to enter into the experience whole-heartedly. Quite likely, in the thick of it I won’t actually be able to tell which way it’s going. But at least, I will be in there.

alter ego

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Please excuse the whiny voice. My Muse needed a few words with me.

 Why don’t I get so much writing done as I should?

Tell me some reasons and I’ll try to help.

I don’t get up early enough- and then it’s all a rush.

Organise yourself at night- set up what you want to do.

I stay up too late – and then I feel bad.

Get into a routine – prepare, and reflect on what you have done well. There will be something.

I mess about on the Internet and then I find hours have passed.

Aye – I know you like a bit of a company. Try going outside and talking to real people. Switch it off.

I do housework and other stuff first. Then I’m all flaked out.

I see the procrastination demon’s been around. Get shot of it by doing what you must in an afternoon. Write first.

I get put off by trips to the gym and shopping and washing and drying and the B and B guests. The time in between’s too short to do anything worthwhile.

Piffle. Even five minutes is worth doing.

I think I’m making things worse, not better, with my editing.

So ask. Send it to people you trust. See what works.

It’s a waste of time. I should do something proper that pays. Stack shelves in the Co-op.

You’ve got a willing, supportive husband – why not trust him?

It’s all pointless. I’ll never get published.

Pah. 1. Who said getting published was the mark of a writer? A writer writes. That’s it. 2. You can’t know that. 3. You could publish yourself, anyway.

I’ve left it too late and I’m too old and past it.

So – you’ve learned a lot. Did you really have so much to offer when you were younger?

If I try to make my work saleable, it’ll be inauthentic.

[Give me strength] Your task is to make the story stronger, clearer, more true. That’s what will suit the reader best.

small voice I’m no good.

Now we’re getting down to bedrock. Just tell the tale as best you can. Listen to me, create an honest story – and let others judge if it suits them.

even smaller voice No-one will like it. I can’t stand being rejected again.

Here – pop some armour on when you need to champion yourself. When you’re with me you don’t need to think about that. Write and be blowed!

 

 

 

 

Overdoing it

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My glamorous and talented belly-dance instructress, Jenn will tell you that overdoing it is one of my failings. She does an elegant hip drop with languid grace – I do a great dump of a thing more like a cliff collapse. I have a tendency to make up for what I lack in finesse by enthusiasm.

Such exuberance is endearing in a puppy – but in a woman of my years, possibly less so. I am not, however, arguing for half-heartedness in dance or anything else creative for that matter. I passionately believe in embracing things; in involving your core, both literally and figuratively.

But I have observed that I come unstuck in my writing when I spend all my arrows too soon. I throw similes, metaphors and period details all in at once. Maybe there will be a signpost to a later event and a character revelation – all within a couple of paragraphs. Overcomplicated,  and worst of all, confusing to the reader.

It’s not that I think readers need to have everything pointed out and labelled – but I make it hard for them to see what is important in a welter of extraneous stuff. Think overenthusiastic tour guide telling you about every architectural phase of the stately home’s building, some juicy anecdotes and a list of owners all at once.

Blenheim Palace

I do it on the minor scale too. A sentence about crossing a bridge in Selchester at first go could well be like this –

Georgiana halted on the shining river-worn cobblestones in front of the five bar tollgate, waiting impatiently for the ancient Bridgekeeper to make his grumpy hobbling way to her.

Overwritten or what.

Now it has to be said that there are genres and styles that are properly more elaborate and intricate than others.

Flight of fancy

Plain country style

But if the decoration is only there to distract the eye from a bodge, that’s not good.

Some grand court dresses were cobbled together, I believe.

So in my editing I am endeavouring to locate the one important thing I need to convey in each paragraph – and let everything else serve that. Ideally, that should apply to sentence level too.

Instead of a bottom-of-the fridge stir-fry, I want to create a memorable dish full of flavour – but not too many of them.

‘Non più di cinque’ as the Venetians have it – no more than five

 

 

 

One Writer, Two Masters

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King James Bible (Cambridge Ed.)
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.

I’m editing at the moment. Major structural editing – not nice little finicky detailed stuff I can noodle away at for hours but, as Emma Greenwood so succinctly put it, wrestling the plot snake.

For me, it feels like forensics or reconstructive surgery or some seriously messed-up palaeontology. There are all sorts of unattached bits – which bone goes where, is there more than one dinosaur here – oh look, that’s mammalian from another epoch. My first draft is like the scrapings from the bottom of a tar-pit – a jumble of mismatched fragments that some over-enthusiastic amateur assembled into a monstrosity.

Oh – that would be me.

And I do have some help.There are people who can tell me what sort of shape it ought to be. They know the market, know the form. They can help me make my work meet expectations.

But therein lies the rub. What if it’s something new I’ve uncovered? Whose advice to take with a different kind of a tale – and how would I know with so little experience? Could I re-arrange the pieces into something extraordinary? But whatever I do, I don’t want to create a chimaera, a GMO of a story which suits no-one.

I was mulling over this when I came across this generous and honest reply by Joanne Harris to a young man who had not enjoyed her two Rune books. [Do read all of it – it is an object lesson in how to respond on-line]. This is the paragraph which stuck out as if highlighted by the Muse in cerise –

A writer can (and should) only try to please one person at a time. That person is the writer herself – because trying to please anyone else, or modifying what you write for the sake of a real or imagined readership leads, not only to madness, but to dishonest writing. And, whatever else we expect of them, we need writers to be true.

My blood fizzes at that with a thrill made of recognition and anxiety. There’s the peril I may never produce something that someone else wishes to publish. Mrs Sensible says I must produce something marketable. She holds out her phone with the image of someone reading and enjoying my book – it is tagged ‘success’.

And like all true temptations, it is based in truth – that is my definition of doing well.

But as I gaze at that, the Muse wanders away. She is a jealous goddess and wants my undivided attention.

What I want, then, is the wisdom to reshape my work to be the thing it is – only better. I want to listen to advice with discernment, to make changes for the deepest and best of reasons.

I can only have one Mistress.

Sniffing it out

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This last weekend I was at Dunford House on a writing retreat with many of my fellow SCBWI-BI members. Amongst all the other joyful events, we had a workshop with the lovely, talented and far-too-young Lucy Christopher on Setting.

One aspect she dwelt upon was the role of the senses in engaging the reader – how they can transport the reader to the time and place we want them to experience. I have to say many of my favourite books are crammed full of sensory detail – I am seduced by authors who can handle these well – Joanne Harris immediately springs to mind.

For this post, I’m going to focus on just one – the sense of smell.

Here’s a selection that I find deeply evocative – and what they provoke for me

  • Fortune’s kippers in Whitby – Goths and impossibly dark and  romantic setting
  • coal tar works – it depended on where the wind blew – going homne up the motorway from Uni
  • the mixture of fried onions and candy floss you get at a fair – exciting
  • mildewed books, incense and damp stone in an unheated church – thrill of singing
  • melting tar on a hot August day when stuck in a traffic jam on the way to Scarborough – boredom , impatience
  • WD-40 – my house reeked of it with three motorbiking sons and a husband – irritation, amusement and sometimes fear
  • newly mown grass and white- lining smell on school sports day – anxiety
  • freshly sawn wood at the timber mill – my father was a builder and carpenter – anticipation  of a new building site
  • linseed oil putty – see above – my grandad’s patience – he worked with my dad too
  • coal fires – comfort on a winters’ day
  • post-Bonfire Night fireworks and ashes – often damp and a little sad – but with happy memories, reliving the delight of rockets and catherine wheels
  • flour and cooking margarine and eggs – cooking with my Nanna, happiness

I think it works best when the smell you choose is both specific to a location – and has an emotional resonance. I am terrible cynic – I use vanilla around our bed-and-breakfast to suggest ice-cream and innocent seaside holiday fun.

One extraordinary find from location research  really sticks in my olfactory memory – inside the roofs of Cathedrals, it smells like steam engines. Honestly. Perhaps 19th century air is still trapped in there.

I wonder which scents trigger a response in you, dear reader.

 

 

‘Wibbly-wobbly, wibbly-wobbly,’ sang the Baby

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I owe an apology to Nick Cross.

He is this month’s moderator for the SCBWI -BI email group – and he sent round a great suggestion to get us all thinking and replying.

They say that “Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down” and much the same can be said of writers…

So, I’d like to open the floor for a wobble workshop today. Are you reeling from a rejection, a bad review or a self-inflicted confidence loss? Why not let the group know and I promise we can deliver an instant confidence boost!

I have to apologise because I said I didn’t want to wobble in a public forum – and guess what I’m going to do now?

I am definitely of an age when I can sing that irritating little jingle/earworm. In fact, I’ve often thought of it (sadly) as a something of a motto.

http://youtu.be/girA7GS9hDg

This would be cooler. But the principle’s the same – resilience. The more you put yourself ‘out there’, the more Life will poke your plump little tummy and send you rocking and reeling. It’s bonkers – and possibly addictive.

I put myself up for a writer-in-residence in Northumberland – and even with the support of David Almond ( how’s that for chutzpah?) – I didn’t get it. Wallop. Right over on the side looking at the battered daisies.

But then I think of the way Weebles work. They have a central weight inside which pulls them back to standing. I look at that as my core – not what I am trying to achieve but what is deep and essential; what I am. All the oscillations around that are just, well, wobbles.

So if any of my wibbles and wobbles can help some one else, great. Otherwise I will keep my wavering to myself.

And the quotation at the top? It’s from one of Jill Murphy’s marvellous Large Family books. At the end of A Piece of Cake, the elephants learn to accept what they are – large. In my case, that’s as wobbly as Bob Godfrey’s animations.

Past and present

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Most of my writing thus far could be labelled ‘Historical Fantasy’, I would say. I have had lots of fun and inspiration from visiting the settings of my stories and looking around.  I try to get a sense of how that place came to be that way- the story before mine, how the geography evolved, the way it might have been governed – as much physical, political and social background as I can imagine.

But until relatively recently, I couldn’t really deal with the people. I’d go early morning or wait to catch shots without people in them . I avoided them a bit if I’m honest – be a bit shy or perhaps wary.

I had some idea that people then were different – different in a way I could only access through period images and accounts. And there’s clearly a great deal of validity in reading contemporary voices, and looking at what they saw – especially for ‘true’ historical writers.

But I take liberties.

I don’t think there were any selkie colonies between Scarborough and Robin Hood’s Bay in the 60s nor a girl who could talk to stone on the south coast of Sussex in Jane Austen’s time. Yet there can be in my head – and through the page – in my readers’ heads.

Understanding this, and accepting that we can only imagine people through what we experience now, has made me much happier to move characters about in time. Years ago as a schoolgirl,  I remember seeing some of Holbein the Younger’s drawings. I’ve never been a fan of the Tudors – but those drawings fascinated me. They were  ‘just like real people in Tudor costumes!’ I recall thinking.

Mary, Lady Guildford, by Hans Holbein the Younger

So now, if I’m in Chichester and I see a huge bloke walking with his legs wide apart to accommodate the movement of his belly like draymen used to roll beer barrels to pub cellars – well, I think ‘you’d fit in well in Selchester’s less reputable streets’. Or I see a girl waiting, shifting her weight from one foot to another, making a pattern on the flagstones like choreography – I wonder if she might anticipate the quadrilles at the Solstice Ball if I slide her back to the winter season 1809.

I reckon it could work the other way too.

Could this woman fit in a contemporary drama?

Perhaps not – but how about this one?

(If you like this pair, there are more here on the Telegraph website – I am indebted to Caroline Lawrence and The History Girls for this)

So what do you think – am I right to mash-up people from different eras – or are people so shaped by the period they live in, it’s just plain wrong?

Rescuing the Heroine

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This post has been partly inspired by the excellent Katherine Langrish and her post Fairytale Princesses: tougher than you think. I can only agree: what I  learned from traditional stories was that kindness and effort brought you more success than vanity and pride. So I don’t want to rescue any of those heroines myself – just the term.

That’s why I winced when I read Kate Mosse refer to ” female action heroes.” In fairness it was in a perfectly reasonable piece asking for more active central characters to be female. I am unlikely to disagree with that. (But oh, the irony – if you read the piece via Mail Online there is article after article defining women by their looks down the side bar.)

There needs to be equality. There needs to be a balance of protagonists who are girls or women. Have a look at picture books. Really look at them. The apparently gender neutral use of animals often masks the presumption that the lead is male.

Out of ten picture books reviewed, only two had female leads.

I think the word ‘hero’ does that – assumes male is the only important way to be.

Not books, I know, but in an idle moment at Budapest airport  I took a look at some toddler toys (British by the way). Lovely primary colours, diggers and dumpers tractors and so forth (some of my favourite things). Out of twenty named characters, three were female.

We seem to have end up back at the Smurfette Principle – if something is marketed at boys, or meant to be unisex, girls will have only a token representation. Girls are ghettoised. In pink.

You’re not supposed to create with this stuff.

And don’t get me started on pink Lego.

1981 Why have we gone backwards?

So it really is important that half our central characters are female – with lots of agency. I would also argue it’s important you make sure your secondary and minor characters are balanced too. I’ve found myself putting too many males.

But our heroines should not just be blokes with breasts.

Lara Croft won’t do. She’s just eye-candy for boys.

Katniss Everdeen is better. Though I wish the trilogy hadn’t dwindled to that defeatist ending – this is the Katniss I wanted:

(It gets me every time)

We will always need more Lyra Belacquas, more Jane Eyres, more Pippi Longstockings, more Tiffany Achings – and my colleagues provide some amazing female central characters. Some full of gusto and yet feminine.

A black belt in Arnis – Philipino Stick & Sword fighting

Just don’t call them ‘heroes’.

 

 

Rather wince than die

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“Will you tell me my fault, frankly as to yourself, for I had rather wince, than die. Men do not call the surgeon to commend the bone, but to set it, Sir.”

Emily Dickinson to mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Drawers of Fortune at the Senso-ji temple in Asakusa, Tokyo, Japan.

I have been thinking a great deal about editing this last week. My story has had its requisite six weeks in a metaphorical drawer and now I am writing with the door open (see Stephen King’s marvellous ‘On Writing‘).

It makes me anxious.

I am fortunate enough to be working with a well-established editor with a great reputation. As a relative beginner, that both helps and worries me. Honesty makes me admit I am shy of letting anyone see what a hash I’ve made on my own. I’m back at school, covering up my misspellings, crossings-out and rubber smudges.

I’ve been advised to focus on what children will respond to most, to plunge the reader straight into a key event, so they know immediately something that I had held back.. This bothers me: I want to shy away from showing my ‘best bit’ too soon, I want to lead up to that ‘ta-daah’ moment. Perhaps I think I can’t follow the reveal, that I will have spent all my dramatic capital.

Also I worry that the reader won’t have had time to get to know Georgiana. Why should they care about her and her strange powers over stone if they haven’t spent time with her to begin with?

In my more dismal moments, I imagine my romping girl morphing into a Lara Croft form, albeit in Regency costume. She becomes a figure in a game-play, dodging over the rooftops of Selchester, whom the reader inhabits but doesn’t engage with.

Would this be such a bad thing? (Jane Austen’s Emma by Strawberry Singh)

But I fret that I could end up with a story with too much action, too much attention to design detail (I do know the City-on-the-Sea awfully well) and too many special effects – and not enough depth. I see it with layers, like those cut-away drawings of what’s beneath your feet – can I convey those layers and keep the narrative drive?

My more sensible side says listen to the industry professional, go with what is suggested and trust you can do it.  You’re most likely to be imagining half of these concerns. And after all, it’s much better to be published and be read than not.

The upshot of all this wibbling* has been to make me think really hard about my non-negotiables. I made myself jot down which aspects of the original draft were essential from memory – to see what sticks. These are the core DNA of Georgiana’s story, but I have to accept that someone else might know better how to bring it out into the world. After all, midwives know more than first-time mothers about birth.

Does anyone care to share their advice with me on this process?

* I am indebted to Jon Mayhew for this delightful word.